for the dress code: http://www.nytimes.com/article/met-gala-theme-hosts-watch.html
review of volume with J.G. Ballard’s short story (#21 in this collection): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Lethem-t.html
Everything You Need to Know About the 2024 Met Gala
What’s the dress code, who’s hosting, who’s going and how to watch.
April 22, 2024
First things first: What is the Met Gala?
Officially, it’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute benefit, a black-tie extravaganza held the first Monday in May to raise money for the museum’s fashion wing, the only curatorial department at the Met that has to pay for itself.
Unofficially, it’s the party of the year, the Oscars of the East Coast and “an A.T.M. for the Met” (the last according to the publicist Paul Wilmot). Consider that last year’s event raised almost $22 million, while the Met’s Art & Artists Gala raised $4.4 million.
How is that possible? What is the secret sauce?
Two words: Anna Wintour.
Ms. Wintour, the global editorial director of Condé Nast and the editor in chief of its marquee fashion magazine, Vogue, has been the gala’s chief mastermind since 1999 after first signing on in 1995, and has transformed the event from a run-of-the-mill charity gala into a mega-showcase for Vogue’s view of the world — the ultimate celebrity-power cocktail of famous names from fashion, film, tech, politics, sports and, increasingly, social media. Every brand scratches every other brand’s back.
We think of it as the Fashion X Games or the All-Star Game of Entrances.
When is it?
The big day is Monday, May 6. In theory, the timed arrivals — each guest is allotted a slot — start at 5:30 p.m., usually with the evening’s hosts, and end around 8 p.m. But you try telling Rihanna when to show up. (Last year she came so late, other guests had already begun to leave.)
Is there a theme?
The party signals the opening of the Costume Institute’s annual blockbuster show, and the benefit is usually themed to the exhibition. Last year, that was easy — Karl Lagerfeld, the designer of Chanel, Fendi and his own brand, was both subject and dress code. But this year the show is called “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” and it is a lot more convoluted.
It will be built around not fairy tales or Disney, but rather treasures in the museum’s fashion collection so old and delicate that they cannot be displayed on mannequins. Instead, the exhibit will involve A.I. and 3-D recreations of the work, as well as sound and, um … smell. But that’s not all.
The idea of decaying dresses — in total, the show will include about 250 pieces from four centuries — led Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, to think about the ephemerality of nature, which led to gardens … which ultimately led to the party’s dress code.
OK, what is the dress code?
It’s as potentially confusing as the exhibit. Guests have been instructed to dress for “The Garden of Time,” so named after a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard about an aristocratic couple living in a walled estate with a magical garden while an encroaching mob threatens to end their peaceful existence. To keep the crowd at bay, the husband tries to turn back time by breaking off flower after flower, until there are no more blooms left. The mob arrives and ransacks the estate, and the two aristocrats turn to stone.
Just what comes to mind when you think “fashion,” right?
How this parable will be expressed in fabulousness has left many scratching their heads, but for anyone in doubt, roses are the most likely default. Also corsets, drapery and — hopefully — a great vintage gown or two; given his recent popularity, the smart money is on old Galliano resurfacing.
Still, there may be some surprises. Last year, Jared Leto came dressed as Mr. Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, in full kitty glory. (After weeks of speculation, the look’s inspiration ultimately did not attend.) Given that Loewe is one of the sponsors of the evening and exhibit, you can expect a lot of Jonathan Anderson creations. He did once make a coat that sprouted real grass. That would look terrific as a formal sheath, don’t you think?
Who are the hosts?
Joining Ms. Wintour as the 2024 gala’s co-chairs are Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya, Chris Hemsworth and Bad Bunny, while the honorary chairs are Mr. Anderson of Loewe and Shou Zi Chew, the chief executive of TikTok. (TikTok is sponsoring alongside Loewe and Condé Nast, though given what is currently happening in Washington with that social media company, whether he shows up at all is a question.) Like the party itself, the combination of hosts is all about the mix: music, film, fashion and social media.
Who are the livestream hosts?
To give an inside look at the gala, Vogue will be livestreaming the event for the fourth year in a row. Hosts have not yet been announced, but last year they included La La Anthony, Derek Blasberg, Emma Chamberlain and Chloe Fineman.
Who’s invited?
The guest list is a closely guarded secret. Unlike other cultural fund-raisers, like the Metropolitan Opera gala or the Frick Collection Young Fellows Ball, the Met Gala is invitation-only. Entry is not just about price — which this year is a whopping $75,000 for one ticket ($25,000 more than last year), with tables beginning at $350,000. Qualifications for inclusion have more to do with buzz, achievement and beauty — the gospel according to Anna — than money. Ms. Wintour has the final say over every invitation and attendee.
That means that even if you give tons of money to the museum, you won’t necessarily qualify; and even if a company buys a table, it cannot choose everyone who will sit at that table. It must clear any guests with Ms. Wintour and Vogue and pray for approval. This year, as in 2023, there are about 400 Chosen Ones, according to a spokeswoman for the Costume Institute.
Rihanna has confirmed her presence. Given the hosts, it’s also a pretty safe bet that Ben Affleck, Ms. Lopez’s husband, will be there; ditto Elsa Pataky, Mr. Hemsworth’s wife. Chances are likewise high that Loewe faces such as Greta Lee, Josh O’Connor, Taylor Russell and Jamie Dornan may also show. There will probably also be a Kardashian/Jenner or two, judging from years past, and odds are good that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez will step out — though the hottest speculation is around such names as Caitlin Clarke, Sam Altman and the current celebrity royal couple, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
Last year a cockroach made a surprise, and very New York, appearance.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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ESSAY
Poet of Desolate Landscapes
By Jonathan Lethem, published Sept. 8, 2009
By the time J. G. Ballard died in April of this year, talk of his long struggle with cancer should have prepared his followers (“fans” is too pale a word for the devotion Ballard inspired), yet the news still came as a shock. Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist, at ease in the cold ruins of the millennium a lifetime sooner than the rest of us; his passing registered as a disorienting claim of time upon the timeless. Whether you embrace or reject on his behalf the label “science-fiction writer” will indicate whether you regard it as praiseful or damning, but no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect or the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian. Now, and not a moment too soon, comes The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (Norton, $35), a staggering 1,200-page collection of a lifetime’s labors in the medium in which Ballard was perhaps most at home.
Each of Ballard’s 98 short stories is like a dream more perfectly realized than any of your own. His personal vocabulary of scenarios imprints itself from the very first, each image with the quality of a newly minted archetype. Ballard was the poet of desolate landscapes marked by signs of a withdrawn human presence: drained swimming pools, abandoned lots littered with consumer goods, empty space stations, sites of military or vehicular tragedies. Himself trained in medicine, Ballard frequently chose doctors or scientists as protagonists and narrators, yet expertise never spares them from the fates they see overtaking others. If Ballard’s view of the human presence in his landscapes is grimly diagnostic, his scalpel is wielded with tenderness, his bedside manner both dispassionate and abiding.
Here, the panorama set before one such observer, from “The Day of Forever” (1966): “Despite the almost static light, fixed at this unending dusk, the drained bed of the river seemed to flow with colors. As the sand spilled from the banks, uncovering the veins of quartz and the concrete caissons of the embankment, the evening would flare briefly, illuminated from within like a lava sea. Beyond the dunes the spires of old water towers and the half-completed apartment blocks near the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna emerged from the darkness. To the south, as Halliday followed the winding course of the river, the darkness gave way to the deep indigo tracts of the irrigation project, the lines of canals forming an exquisite bonelike gridwork.” Ballard in a grain of sand — the visual poetry of ruin; a syntax scientifically precise yet surreally oversaturated; and the convergence of the technological and the natural worlds into a stage where human life flits as a violent, temporary shadow. Yet Ballard at his best never seems to load the dice against humanity. He merely rolls them.
Every bit as striking as Ballard’s feeling for entropy is his engagement with arts from which literature too often seems quarantined: music, sculpture, painting, architecture. He evokes artistic creation with the passion of an exile for a lost kingdom. Like his scientific characters, Ballard’s overreaching artists glimpse seeds of doom at the heart of their endeavors. And in perhaps his most famous vision, the novel “Crash,” technology, sculpture, sex and death recede to the same vanishing point: the permanently contemporary site of the car crash.
Returning the favor, the arts relished Ballard. From the Comsat Angels, a rock band named for a 1968 story, to Radiohead, David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, Alexis Rockman, John Gray, Joy Division, Gary Panter and countless others, Ballard probably inspired more rock musicians, philosophers, painters and filmmakers than fiction writers. Reversing the notion of the “writer’s writer,” he’s less esteemed in literary culture than in the wider sphere. His presence is also far stronger in Britain than in the United States. “The Complete Stories” ought to alter both these imbalances.
My own favorite of Ballard’s stories is “The Drowned Giant” (1964). This tale of a vast carcass awash on a local beach is as elegant and devastating as any of Kafka’s or Calvino’s fantasies, simply asking: What happens when Gulliver drifts home?
Equally perfect, “The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B.,” posthumously published in The New Yorker and the penultimate story in the collection, gently inserts the writer himself into an emptied-out version of his beloved London suburb of Shepperton, there to discover himself at an endpoint that is also a beginning. With his more celebrated role as a social critic of modernity, Ballard was also a poet of infinite regress (much as Borges described Kafka, in “Kafka and His Precursors”), gnawing at the Zeno’s paradox of our place in the cosmos with the rigor of an Escher or Bach.
Not to take away from his verdict on the 20th century: Ballard’s a bard of techno-anomie, of late-capitalist disaffection, and his writings are just the tonic if your local cloverleaf traffic jam or gated community or global warming harbinger has got you feeling out of sorts. But it’s precisely his grounding in deeper undercurrents of cosmic-existentialist wonder that give that tonic its fizz. His is the voice reminding you not to take the postmodern hangover too personally: it was always going to happen this way.
A writer viewed as radical is rarely also so entrenched in formal reserve as was Ballard. Much of the energy in his fiction comes from the pull of his prophecy against the dutiful, typically middle-class English politesse of his characters, the unradicalism of their attitudes toward one another and themselves. In the “Vermilion Sands” stories, scattered through the first two decades of his career, much of the dialogue might be taken from a Barbara Pym novel, if instead of small-town vicarages Pym’s milieu had been a crumbling desert resort inhabited by aging celebrities.
Ultimately, Ballard is simply a master story writer — the maker of unforgettable artifacts in words, each as absolute and perplexing as sculptures unviewable from a single perspective. In this book of 98 stories, there are at least 30 you can spend a lifetime returning to, to wander and wonder around. Even the lesser pieces are invaluable, because they support rather than diminish the masterworks and because Ballard’s hand is always unmistakable.
Taking the measure of a writer’s life’s work can be intimidating, yet I hope this book will be not just purchased but read. Ballard’s sensibility rewards immersion; indeed, it thrives there. He may have written both an autobiographical diptych of novels (“Empire of the Sun” and “The Kindness of Women”) and an actual autobiography, but these stories form another version of autobiography: one inadvertent, oracular and deeply telling.
I should add that I’m no Ballard “expert.” I quit keeping up with his novels after “Running Wild” (1988), never to return, and though I believed myself well schooled in his stories there were dozens here I’d never read before; in fact, my prime years reading him are a quarter-century behind me. Yet very few writers I’ve encountered, even those I’ve devoted myself to, have burrowed so deeply in my outlook, and in my work, where I find myself recapitulating Ballardian patterns not for their beauty (though they are beautiful) but for their tremendous aptness in attempting to confront the dying world before me, and inside me.
Consider this, then, a late-to-press elegy for perhaps the most cosmically elegiac writer in literature — and like all who mourn, Ballard had first to love.
Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, “Chronic City,” will be published in October.
Abycats' Thoughts 